I feel like most engineers are pretty good at working remotely (c.f. all of open source).
Managers however seem to have a very hard time adjusting. If I were to give some "best practices" for remote management, they would be:
* Don't worry about how your reports are spending their time. If someone doesn't get back to you, they are busy.
* Don't factor an employee's location into their compensation.
* Minimize meetings (this is for non-wfh too, but it's much easier when people are remote).
* Allow people to leave their cameras off during calls.
* Don't worry so much about flying people to meet IRL. It's expensive and disruptive. It may also introduce politics that won't exist if everyone stays remote.
* Realize that a lot of what people think of as "management" is actually unneeded babysitting that's a vestigial cargo-cult from the industrial revolution. Your job is to hire, motivate and unblock. That's pretty much it.
I wonder if the role of manager will go away and be replaced with more specialized roles. I actually think it might be nice for a company to provide a therapist for people to to privately talk to. That's always been a weird roll that managers often play. It would be nice to vent to someone who doesn't get to decide your next raise. Between some level of HR outlet, product management and mentorship, I don't really see a dedicated role for what we now call "manager".
> I feel like most engineers are pretty good at working remotely (c.f. all of open source).
Most engineers are not on GitHub or any of the other social coding sites, let alone contributing to or managing an open source project. And anyone who is managing an open source project can tell you how much work it is to help other engineers contribute constructively.
Your idea of a managerial role doesn't seem to leave much room for technical or team leads, only "product management". Sometimes your role is to hire/motivate/unblock - and sometimes the motivational role is make sure someone spends those three hours writing unit tests everyone agreed were important even though no one wants to.
Open source is just one example. In general I would say engineers work well in a quite place with no distractions and minimal bureaucracy. It is creative work after all.
> Your idea of a managerial role doesn't seem to leave much room for technical or team leads, only "product management". Sometimes your role is to hire/motivate/unblock - and sometimes the motivational role is make sure someone spends those three hours writing unit tests everyone agreed were important even though no one wants to.
I did include mentorship in my list of things needed to help engineers grow. I'd also add "everyone agreed" in a traditional management setting is pretty much identical to "the person who decides how much people get paid, said so". Good devs will typically write the appropriate amount of testing unprodded.
Engineers (and everybody else) like working in places with no distractions and minimal bureaucracy. But that doesn't mean they all work well them.
> I'd also add "everyone agreed" in a traditional management setting is pretty much identical to "the person who decides how much people get paid, said so".
Absolutely no one on our team deciding what people get paid has any say in how many tests we write. The engineering manager has some say (mostly as a tie-breaker) in technical decisions but does not "decide" how much anyone gets paid (outside of salary range for new job postings), but can choose to advocate (or not) for a particular person's salary with higher management. The senior developers have the most say, and they determine no one's salary.
> Good devs will typically write the appropriate amount of testing unprodded.
Qualifying this with "good devs" somewhat begs the question. I would rather avoid judging the developers and just say, no, most developers will not typically write the appropriate amounts of tests by without some friendly reminders.
> Engineers (and everybody else) like working in places with no distractions and minimal bureaucracy. But that doesn't mean they all work well them.
I don't think evidence exists to suggest they don't. From a burnout perspective alone, making people work in an environment they don't like will cause attrition. Especially now that there are plenty of WFH options. That's not even touching on how stress impacts creativity.
> Qualifying this with "good devs" somewhat begs the question. I would rather avoid judging the developers and just say, no, most developers will not typically write the appropriate amounts of tests by without some friendly reminders.
Our personal experiences are diametrically opposed to each other then. I've never seen lack of tests be an issue on any team I've worked with. I have however seen unproductive teams create tests in place of being productive.
There's a wide range between "burn out" and "had to do something I didn't want to at work today", just like there's a wide range between "my manager's bugging me every 30 seconds on slack" and "why can't I just write the whole feature from my one-sentence description heads-down for 3 weeks and then put up 5k lines at once for code review?" A lot of otherwise-competent developers will do the latter if you don't force them otherwise. (Way more common even among developers skilled at time management: Getting caught up in a bug for X days and not asking for help.)
One view is of course that these are not "good developers" and you should not hire them or work with them. Two better views are that these are developers that need to learn a new skill to be even more effective and this will take time and someone pushing to actively learn it; or that even if they don't ever learn it, they can still be effective at their job when supported by a more active manager. (And a critical piece of advice for managers - that doesn't mean you need to be more active for everyone else on the team at the same time.)
I have worked on teams closer to as you have described, but I would say that's on a separate axis from functional/dysfunctional - it's very easy to get a team of insular divas - or even sustainable/non-sustainable - developers can build the perfect thing on schedule which no one will want to pay for, which a heavier-handed product-focused manager might have prevented.
I do think people who can self-organize are also very good at self-selecting into similar groups. This can result in the illusion that developers are much more effective at this than they believe. Two decades of free money and easy job-hopping resulting in no consequences for bad decisions also helps maintain that illusion - for bad managers also.
I respect your opinion but have a different philosophy.
> why can't I just write the whole feature from my one-sentence description heads-down for 3 weeks and then put up 5k lines at once for code review?" A lot of otherwise-competent developers will do the latter if you don't force them otherwise. (Way more common even among developers skilled at time management: Getting caught up in a bug for X days and not asking for help.)
I’d argue that both of those are ok, and the former is even desirable. If you have a dev who wants to do that, they are usually quite good and you should embrace their creativity and productivity.
The vast majority of “deadlines” are completely artificial and don’t match the way great software is written (by inspired devs). So much value creation is the search for black swans. Great developers have the ability to make those if you optimize for it.
I could see an ad agency or something having deadlines, but personally I would never work in that environment as I prefer product work and maximizing creativity and individual contribution.
"Embracing their creativity and productivity" is hell for the rest of the team who now has to do 5k line code reviews or the feature is forever siloed to that one dev. Most work is not inspiring; when it is it's usually because someone else is spending their time eating shit to give you room to get inspired.
> The vast majority of “deadlines” are completely artificial
IDK, to me it sounds like you have worked in a half dozen B2C startups in a US urban region, all with plenty of money to burn and still seeking "product-market fit". Most development work doesn't go that way. If we don't have A, B, and C ready by the end of the year contracts get breached and people get laid off.
> "Embracing their creativity and productivity" is hell for the rest of the team who now has to do 5k line code reviews or the feature is forever siloed to that one dev. Most work is not inspiring; when it is it's usually because someone else is spending their time eating shit to give you room to get inspired.
I actually think it's ok to silo projects to a single dev if you design your architecture correctly so that their zone has well defined APIs. I've definitely seen this work better than design/dev by committee.
> IDK, to me it sounds like you have worked in a half dozen B2C startups in a US urban region, all with plenty of money to burn and still seeking "product-market fit".
It's true! (except for the seeking product market fit part, they have had it). I definitely enjoy this type of development better, I also think it leads to the best results and the highest quality software if done right (alongside open source).
> Most development work doesn't go that way. If we don't have A, B, and C ready by the end of the year contracts get breached and people get laid off.
I'm 100% sure you're correct, but I don't think this is developer friendly or a good thing. Part of making great software is having the proper business infrastructure around it. That includes sales, which definitely shouldn't have contract deadlines for unshipped features imho.
>I actually think it might be nice for a company to provide a therapist for people to to privately talk to. That's always been a weird roll that managers often play.
It would be interesting to break down what percentage of 1:1 time with employees is spent in therapy-like discussions. It feels like this role isn't recognized enough, except perhaps by the managers themselves.
Two great managers I've had both regarded this as one of their highest duties.
As an engineer, having someone above you in the chain of command who regularly asks things like "how are you feeling about work? Bad? Good? Are you stressed or content?" is a big deal. Even if the answer is a totally noncommittal "everything's fine" 99% of the time, that 1% is absolutely critical to be aware of.
Thank you for your message.
I recognize myself in the "regarded this as one of their highest duties", but sometimes it's a lot, especially when you get your own thing going (covid and such).
So thank you. I feel appreciated for the effort I put in this, even though we don't know each other :)
Managers however seem to have a very hard time adjusting. If I were to give some "best practices" for remote management, they would be:
* Don't worry about how your reports are spending their time. If someone doesn't get back to you, they are busy.
* Don't factor an employee's location into their compensation.
* Minimize meetings (this is for non-wfh too, but it's much easier when people are remote).
* Allow people to leave their cameras off during calls.
* Don't worry so much about flying people to meet IRL. It's expensive and disruptive. It may also introduce politics that won't exist if everyone stays remote.
* Realize that a lot of what people think of as "management" is actually unneeded babysitting that's a vestigial cargo-cult from the industrial revolution. Your job is to hire, motivate and unblock. That's pretty much it.
I wonder if the role of manager will go away and be replaced with more specialized roles. I actually think it might be nice for a company to provide a therapist for people to to privately talk to. That's always been a weird roll that managers often play. It would be nice to vent to someone who doesn't get to decide your next raise. Between some level of HR outlet, product management and mentorship, I don't really see a dedicated role for what we now call "manager".